Pervasive Communication Lab

Welcome to Pervasive Communication Lab !

Ubiquitous computing names the third wave in computing. First were mainframes, each shared by lots of people. Now we are in the personal computing era, person and machine staring uneasily at each other across the desktop. Next comes ubiquitous computing, or the age of calm technology, when technology recedes into the background of our lives. This will allow smaller application specific computers will be available everywhere - and nowhere.

A prerequisite for such a future is pervasive communications. The idea is that data and voice communications must be available anytime, anywhere- like the air we breathe. With technologies such as web-enabled cell phones, WiFi hotspots, IP communications are well on their way to becoming pervasive.

Obviously such communications will have to be wireless. However current technologies make the goal of an "always on" society very expensive. We believe the future of wireless networks will not follow the traditional base-station to mobile model, but will be peer-to-peer or ad hoc.

Our research here at the University of Colorado focuses on exactly such networks. Ad Hoc networks by definition do not require any infrastructure. For example users could simply walk into a meeting with their nodes (laptops, nodes, cell phones etc) and a network could automatically be formed. Or future dual mode cell phones armed with 802.11 capabilities could as an intercom phone as soon as a user enters his office building. Because the spectrum for 802.11 is free, the running cost of such a private network within a building would be negligible.

More specifically we have currently developed an Energy Aware Routing protocol, called EADSR. This protocol automatically selects energy efficient routes, thus increasing the lifetime of a network. EADSR has been implemented on laptops and iPAQs running Linux using the Click Modular router. This setup has been tested with a test-bed that we also developed called EWANT.